What remains is the memory of presence. A memory leaves an imprint in or on our mind and body. It becomes an identification and recall of objects, places and exchange of individual or collective stories. Imprints are traces and visualizations, written by experiences in our lives. What remains is unique and not repeatable.

We think and feel in pictures, in remembrance and imagination. But we quickly reach a border if we try to grasp just one single moment in every aspect, full size. A specific smell, a tiny sound, an unexpected movement or a spatial feeling, everything what creates our perception is hardly to shape in an image. But these moments of transience like losing a friend, sitting under the Christmas tree, the first step in an unknown country, follow us our entire life as a notion of knowledge.

We are surrounded by icons, commercials, street signs; nearly each information contains an image. The power of images is an important research field in performance art, because the ephemeral quality generates another reality than an image in the internet or a picture at the wall. But don’t we need to ask about the meaning and sense of producing documentations of these situations, the useless try to catch invisibility?

Sometimes Performance Art creates images like blank spaces, without a straight or clear meaning. Performance can provoke disturbing moments, strong emotional reactions or simply absurdity; the receptions of performative images occur often in a variety of possible images which the audiences can fill up with own imaginations and experiences.

Within the use of Photography in Performance Art, both Medias are able to interact directly with the audience and can change the perception of perspectives, motions and emotional states. Both Medias uses different strategies, but in the ideal case, they are both close to grasp the essence of this blank space – the essence of a moment.

PAS#27 After Image is searching within the intersection between Photography as one aspect of documentation and Performance Art as an ephemeral art practice. With this discourse we want to take part in the running discussions about documentation, preserving and archiving the relics of Performance Art pieces. The aim of this 12 days study is to work out a performance, to present this as part of the final presentation in the Grimmuseum and reflect on how we document this art pieces.